Marcia Richard, a 33rd District Democratic candidate
for delegate, had met all manner of voters this campaign, among them an
older gentleman who turned out to chauffeur for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Candidates never know who'll open that door they pound on, including
the woman who said to Richard: "I thought you were tall and thin."

Replied the sturdy but barely plump Richard: "So did I."

Insults and rejection are part of the job, and the job in the waning
days of the political season has gotten grueling. Aspirants dart across
their counties to building dedications, civic meetings, fraternal lodges
and church festivals. They never know whom they'll see. Or whether they'll
see the same people they just saw. Or whether no one at all will show up.

So much uncertainty can be maddening to politicians, whose primary motivation
to begin with is a need to control.

Catching up with veteran political animal Mary Krug at the opening of
Marrick Center, a new office complex in Dunkirk, we asked what the home
stretch is like for candidates.

"They're all going crazy,"
said Krug, who is retiring after two terms as a Calvert County Commissioner.

"This is the week when you're trying to figure out exactly what
it is you should be doing. One candidate said to me, 'With all these forums
this week, it's going to be all the same people. Do I have to go to every
one'?"

"I said, "You're not going to get any more votes by going,
but you'll probably lose some by not going."

Tell a candidate you saw them at a forum and nine of ten will reply:
"Which one?" This is the season when voters size up their would-be
leaders like horse-flesh, when political junkies get their itches scratched.
Of course, familiarity does not always bring decision.

As the story goes, an Annapolis woman up in years was asked if she liked
County Executive John Gary. "I haven't made up my mind," she said.
"I've only met him five times."

If you're running for office, meeting the same people over and over does
you little good. But it's better than meeting hardly any people at all.

At a Calvert County League of Women Voters gathering last week, the hall
at the Calvert Pines Center in Prince Frederick looked packed. Maybe 80
people. But the trained eye of Del. George Owings saw something else.

"If you take all of the candidates and their wives and families,
there aren't more than two rows of people. And I brought them here,"
he said.

Owings said he'd been at an event a week earlier when more candidates
than voters turned out.

To Chris Homan, a Democratic candidate for county commissioner, the modest
gatherings he sees contrast starkly to his travels abroad where he teaches
democracy to people who crave it. "Maybe this suggests that things
are much better here," he said, referring to a tendency of contented
people to stay home.

Del. Tony O'Donnell, a Republican
and an engineer at Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, had a simpler analysis:
"People's lives are very busy," he said. "They don't have
a lot of time to come out. And they get their information from a lot of
sources."

Knowing those sources - and putting themselves and their messages in
the right places - is the trick of the trade. Should I drop by the donut
shop or the flea market, they ask themselves. Should I advertise in the
weekly newspaper on cable television?

"It's almost a helpless time," said Mary Krug, who has spared
herself by not running again. "How many more doors can you knock on?
You can't write any more ads or put up any more signs.. And it's a nervous
time; the races are all so close."

But Krug, secretary of the Calvert County Democratic Central Committee,
hasn't stepped away altogether. Which goes to show that once infected by
the political bug, you may never be cured. "I even have my 84-year-old
mother making get-out-the-vote phone calls," she said.

-NBT

Letters from Lost Towns

Fallen on Hard Times: A Ghastly
Lament

by James G. Gibb

"We had a dismal voyage," wrote Dr. Richard
Hill in January, 1740, to his son, Richard Jr. Dr. Hill was referring to
the stormy four-week voyage from New York to Madeira, an island off the
Atlantic coast of North Africa.

He could as easily have meant the true beginning of his voyage: the misfortunes
that led to his forced exile to Portugal's colony in Madeira after his bankruptcy
in London Town, Maryland. His story has been pieced together from archaeological
digs and research begun in Historic London Town Park, which is now growing
where the Hills long ago flourished and declined.

Dr. Hill's early years had promised better. A gentleman by birth and
education and wealthy through family connections, the Londontowner married
Deborah Moore, 16-year-old daughter to merchant and physician Mordecai Moore.
Just before his marriage, around 1720, Hill purchased lots in London and
the couple settled either in, or just outside of, town. Like his father-in-law,
Dr. Hill was both a merchant and a physician. Through work, marriage and
inheritance, he amassed a substantial fortune and a small fleet of sailing
ships that traded to Europe, Africa and the West Indies.

With the training and leisure to study plants and their medicinal qualities,
Hill became a notable gentleman-botanist. The prestigious Royal Society
of London sought information from Hill about the curative powers of several
Maryland plants, among them Jerusalem Oak, a species of lamb's quarters.
Hill reported:

The Jerusalem Oak is a very fetid Plant, and supposed to be a specific
in hypochondriac cases. The most common preparation for that purpose is
a Tincture or infusion with Rum and those who are fond of it say that a
Glass of it suddenly relieves in a depression of Spirits But this effect
I believe is partly owing to the Rum.

But by 1736 or 1737, the loss of ships at sea and other business reversals
put an end to Dr. Hill's correspondence with the Royal Society. He was in
debt and greatly embarrassed. His brother Levin was incarcerated for debt
and Dr. Hill petitioned the General Assembly to pass a personal act that
would protect him from creditors and from sharing a cell with his brother.
(Under British law of the 18th and 19th centuries, fraud and bankruptcy
differed little. Creditors could have bankrupts confined to prison indefinitely,
their rationale being that debtors had hidden assets or family that could
discharge the debt.)

When the General Assembly rejected the petition, Dr. Hill sold his London
lots, farms, ships, livestock and slaves to satisfy his principal creditors,
George Plater and Charles Carroll. He still owed money. His solution: leave
most of his children with his newly married daughter in Philadelphia and
move to Madeira. There, through family and business connections and credit,
he started a wine commission house, shipping Madeira wine to clients in
England, the American colonies and the West Indies.

Richard and Deborah Hill struggled to regain the family name and fortune,
a fight they eventually won, but at the cost of separation from their young
family. The children in Philadelphia never saw their mother again, Deborah
dying in Madeira in 1751. Dr. Hill returned in 1754, visiting family in
Philadelphia and London Town. He returned to the family business in Funchal,
Madeira, in 1757. Dr. Hill returned to Philadelphia in 1761, knowing full
well that he would die there. And so he did on the eighth of January, 1762,
his son-in-law Samuel Preston Moore paying a barber to shave the corpse
and powder the doctor's wig.

Through more than a decade of exile, the family had stayed in contact,
consigning hurriedly written letters to departing ships. Many of the letters,
preserved by The Library Company of Philadelphia, concern business matters.
But Richard and Deborah Hill also wrote lengthy letters exhorting their
children to be virtuous, honest and prudent. To his daughters Rachel, Peggy
and Sally, Dr. Hill wrote in September, 1752:

My dear children-I desire you to live in love and mutual affection for
each other. Apply yourselves to the improvement of your minds, by reading
good and instructive books; always having regard to your conversation and
deportment to the decency and delicacy so becoming your sex, not neglecting
any opportunity of learning such commendable works as are suitable to it.

The surviving Hill family letters suggest that all of the Hill children
heeded their parents' advice.

Yes, it had been a dismal voyage. But Richard and Deborah Hill were not
entirely disappointed in their expectations. Their children became respectable,
well-educated Quakers, married well and maintained their father's wine business.

Author's note: The stories of both generations of Hills are
told in a small book ($5.95) by Mechelle Kerns of The Lost Towns of Anne
Arundel Project and Mollie Ridout of the London Town Foundation.

Dr. Hill's disconsolate ghost complains of his bitter luck and recalls
better times this Halloween weekend in Ghosts of the Past, an original play
by NBT's Lost Towns correspondent, Jim Gibb. Oct. 29 to 31 from 6 to 9pm
with cider and ginger cookies following at one of Anne Arundel County's
lost towns, London Town Park, Edgewater. Ages 7+. $8 w/discounts; rsvp:
410/222-1919.

From Camp Letts to the Pentagon:
War Resisters March

They came here to talk peace. To listen. To be heard.
To forge words into action.

Mind you, 'they' are not Israeli or Palestinian. Rather, they are the
225 peace activists who gathered in Southern Anne Arundel County this month
to mark the 75th anniversary of the War Resisters League. Organizers of
the three-day conference at YMCA Camp Letts in Edgewater challenged activists
old and new to "be realistic, demand the impossible," a call to
action that culminated with A Day Without the Pentagon protest rally in
Washington, D.C.

"We want to break our country's 1.7 billion-dollar-a-day addiction
to the military," said Joanne Sheehan of War Resisters International.

Since its founding in 1923 by men and women who opposed World War I,
the War Resisters League had branded war as a crime against humanity. Over
the years, members have vowed not to support war or violence in any way
- at home or abroad, in self-defense or revolution. Adopting the teachings
of Mohandas Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, the League advocates non-violent
action as well as education to realize a vision of world peace: a world
free of violence, poverty, social injustice and military force.

Drawn by the power of that improbable vision, they came to Bay Country.

From all points of the compass and all walks of life, they came: a school
teacher from Los Angeles; a farmer from Pennsylvania; a civil rights worker
from Connecticut; a high school student from New York City; a historian
from Nova Scotia; people as varied as their fashions, which ran from the
wild and free to the prim and proper.

In workshops and panel discussions, they reflected on pacifism and the
strategy of non-violence. They brainstormed new directions. They reviewed
the nuts-and-bolts of organizing people and protests. They got the legal
skinny on war tax resistance: the refusal to pay part of or all federal
tax.

"We must challenge our culture's notion that conflict leads to war,"
said Shelby Grantham, 58, a self-described "aging hippie" who
teaches a course in non-violence at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. "Conflict
is an inherent part of living," Grantham acknowledged. "The challenge
is to show people that the non-violent solution maybe isn't as familiar
or sensational as the violent one, but it can be just as interesting."

Grantham, who cut her teeth in non-violent activism during the civil
rights and anti-war movements of the '60s, and who has "marched around
the Pentagon for the past 30 years" marched there once again last week.
Beside her was her 10-year old daughter, Grey.

Like Grantham, most have been walking the talk for years. Many, including
Grantham, were arrested during protests. Some spent days, months, even years
in jail - for acts of conscience and civil disobedience.

Guest speaker Dave Dellinger, a renown activist and former editor of
left-wing publication Liberation, spent three years in prison for resisting
the draft during World War II. Anti-war organizer and former League staffer
Randy Kehler spent two years in prison for resisting the Vietnam War draft.

If such stands make the rest of us uncomfortable, the resolve behind
them is even more unsettling.

"Sacrifice is not a popular word," one activist at the conference
observed. "Social change doesn't come without cost. That's hard for
Americans, who can't handle inconvenience, let alone suffering."

For some, like retired Baltimore Sun writer Isaac Rehert, the answer
wasn't so simple. A former conscientious objector who spent three years
in jail during WWII for refusing to go to war, Rehert came to conference
Saturday looking for insight. At the end of the day, he still was still
looking.

"How do you resist non-violently in a situation like Kosovo?"
Rehert wanted to know. "Or Nazi Germany?

"Would 'putting up one hand in resistance while reaching out with
the other in peace' have worked there? I wanted the League to give a clue
to someone who doesn't want to commit violence and yet doesn't want others
to be slaughtered."

Veterans came, too. Korean War vet Peter Shaw, a retired physicist from
Penn State, and former Marine Sanford Kelson marched to the Pentagon with
Veterans for Peace, whose goal is "to abolish war as an accepted method
of resolving international disputes."

Shaw joined the cause in 1991, after becoming appalled by U.S. military
actions in Central America during the '80s.

Kelson, a lawyer from Pittsburgh, served in the Marine Corps from '63-'66
in Alaska. His unit shipped out for Vietnam one month after his discharge.

"They went from 30 below to 100 above. They were told Alaska was
great training for them." Back home, Kelson got letters from his buddies
that recounted in distressing detail what was happening in the war. He became
active in Veterans for Peace after that.

So they came, they marched, they rallied. Then they left.

Compared to protests past, the League's A Day Without the Pentagon was
little more than a flea in the Pentagon's fur. By the end of the day, 20
protesters had been arrested for blocking entrances to the building, but
no serious disruptions had occurred. It was a mere whisper of the tumultuous
days of 30 years ago.

But if the protesters' ranks seem thin against the machine they aim to
stop, they also illuminate the courage that comes with impossible odds:
to believe that ours not only should be a better world, but, given a fighting
chance, that it can be as well.

-Don Kehne

Walk on the Wild Side Raises
$6k

These turtles, beavers and ducks are the
entire kindergarten and first grade class of the Unitarian Universalist
Church of Annapolis plus their teachers. From left, Vicki Barstow, Will
Jacobs, Geoffrey Eckert, Kara Levin, Claire Favret, Alex Crilly and Valerie
Levin.

Beavers, turtles and ducks - dozens of them - claimed
the streets of Annapolis last weekend as, uniting an early Halloween with
the First Annual Walk for Wildlife, humans took the identity of animals
saved from death by oil.

Rescued right here in Chesapeake Country.

Chesapeake Bay is an active industrial waterway. Eight hundred million
gallons of petroleum products travel each year on Maryland waterways, especially
the Bay. We've never had a spill of the magnitude of Alaska's Valdez catastrophe
of 1989, but over a thousand smaller spills foul the Bay each year.

Far more oil emergencies large and small happen inland on tributaries,
ponds and streams. Spilled oil damages water, land and all the animals living
in those environments. Since 1984, Chesapeake Wildlife Sanctuary has ministered
to the animal victims of oil spills. The Wildlife Walk was Chesapeake Wildlife
Sanctuary's newest way of explaining the problem and raising money to solve
it. Two hundred runners and walkers rallied to the cause, raising $6,000
and earning prizes ranging from dinner for 10 at Washington, D.C.'s, famous
Moroccan restaurant, Marrakesh, to tote bags.

Photo by Karen WellsRunners
and walkers, like Annie Posten, Laura Zseleczky and Clara Daly, raised more
than $6,000 for Chesapeake Wildlife Sanctuary.

At checkpoints along the one-, three- and five-mile routes, the beavers,
turtles and ducks were symbolically cleaned of spilled oil and rehabilitated,
until, at the walk's end, each was released back to the wild.

First to be rehabilitated after running the five-mile course was Paul
Dhyse, a teacher at Severn River Middle School. "This is a great effort
to help wildlife," Dhyse said.

Walking, not running, was the entire kindergarten and first grade class
of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis. "This is our field
trip. We thought it would be an ideal way to teach the children about wildlife,"
said teacher Vicki Barstow.

Among the volunteers were more than a dozen students from Long Reach
High School in Columbia, organized by Student Government Association Chair
Kristie Colpo. The students reached out to Chesapeake Wildlife Sanctuary
as part of their goal of performing a thousand hours of community service.
"We are honestly interested in what this is doing to help the Sanctuary.
We care about their efforts in helping wildlife," said Amanda Gardner,
who is her school's president of the National Honor Society.

Other volunteers included realtors and their families from the Deale
Long & Foster office. So all could keep in step, WHFS 99.1 brought music.
Honorary walk chairs were Governor Parris Glendening and former governor
William Donald Schaefer.

Like a shade closing slowly over the countryside,
fall colors trickle down, then fade away. Travel by plane during this time
of year from Maryland to Maine and back as I just did, and you can witness
the warm wash of color on fast forward. It's a clock you set yourself -
losing then gaining - measured in light reflected rather than time.

Up north, cooling temperatures and breezy autumn days already reveal
bare branches, reducing trees to spiny skeletons of their former summer
selves. A chill wind gives the trees a final shudder, and a finale of color
floats to the ground in a blaze of glory. Up north, the landscape is outfitted
for Halloween long before it is in Bay country. But our time will come.

Nothing in nature escapes this seasonal change. In Maine, loons that
migrated to fresh water lakes this spring to breed now turn back to sea.
Earlier this summer, I looked for loons in all the wrong places. Heavy spring
rains had submerged favorite nesting spots. But nature and need always find
a way. Now this big seabird bobs along with young in tow. Having nurtured,
they are now refreshed (is that the way with us?), and with feathers turning
lighter and whiter for winter spent far out in the ocean, the loons willingly
answer the call.

Here in Bay country, where we sight the occasional solitary loon, we
have time before the shade is drawn, maybe even a few more golden Indian
summer days. Hope may spring eternal - like the green grass of our own lawns
or winter wheat in the fields revived for now after summer's drought. We
won't be fooled, but fall's false and fleeting dreams are sweet, nonetheless.

This time of year, clear blue skies cast a hue that renders our shallow
Bay the color of the deep azure sea. The wind will ruffle the surface and
whitecaps will toss and tease the ablest sailor. Soon our own big bird will
descend from the north. Tundra swans will arrive to winter and feed in the
bounty of Bay country. Like the loon, they too will bring their young, for
they too follow the signal of season's change.

Are you ready for the changes the new season will bring? Before the curtain
goes down, don't miss nature's final blaze of glory. Luckily, in Bay country,
we still have time.

-M.L. Faunce

Way Downstream ...

In Idaho, the message in the bottles is disrespect
for the environment. Local official Frank Cisneros of Lava Hot
Springs complained to the Idaho Statesman newspaper that truckers
urinate in bottles and toss them alongside the road. "That's not apple
juice in there I understand they're under pressure to get to their destination
but I don't want that in my community" ...

In Wyoming, the message from forest rangers
is stop contributing to the delinquency of bears. At Bridger-Teton National
Forest, the rangers say they will start enforcing rules against leaving
beer in coolers in the back of pick-ups. Said ranger Scott Williams:
"Bears will drink beer."

In Alabama, a six-foot-tall emu who had a
serious crush on a fellow named Ed Stuardi has been hauled away to
live with her own kind, Reuters news service reports. The love-sick bird
stalked the man for days and, according to the report, "looked at him
forlornly" when he tried to shoo her away ..

In Cambridge, Mass., a new Harvard
forum is giving evidence that love of the environment is more than a passing
fancy. The Center for the Study of World Religions will be studying
connections between religious beliefs and environmentalism. It will study
what role that (alphabetically) Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism,
Daoism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism and Shinto can play
in environmental debates ...

Our CreatureFeature comes from SouthCarolina where researchers at ClemsonUniversity are
trying to solve a ripe problem - the stench from those factory chicken-growing
operations on the Eastern Shore and across the southern "Chicken
Belt."

The newest brainstorm involves lacing up chicken feed with garlic powder,
which the chickens may or may not like. The aim, of course, is improving
the odor around the chicken houses, and researcher Glenn Birrenkott says
he's on to something: "It makes the poultry house smell like a pizzeria."